Does Love define us?

Off balance, I need some fixing

‘If you give me a glimmer of hope, you’re in trouble. I take it to the moon.’ – Mike Tyson

Somebody anonymously sent me a message… unfortunately I can’t respond to what anybody sends me on the contact page and I don’t know who it was (I wish I did), but thank you. Ima hope you’re reading this now so this post is for you. I’m glad you asked the question, and thank you for your v nice words. I didn’t answer it before but here we go.

So

Does love define us?

Initially, I would have said no. I wish I could say no. I would have said that it’s impossible and unfair to say that love makes us who we are, because what about people who never feel anything close to love? Are they just yet to be defined as an individual? Have you not lived until you’ve loved? Have I even felt love to be talking about it so confidently? In that respect, I can’t say it defines us. Until we actually feel it. I guess we just don’t know that we’re all walking around as blank canvases until someone comes and splashes red all over it.

Maybe because with love comes a whole load of other emotions. You feel happiness, excitement, comfort, and some of the worst pain you’ll ever feel in your life. You feel content. Obviously, there are different types of love. Platonic love, familial love, romantic love, love that is almost love but not quite yet there. If you’re incapable of feeling love, you’re kind of a psychopath, but love manifests in different ways. Love always changes your thoughts, your opinions, your priorities, the way you act and the way you make decisions. Isn’t that what defines you as a person? If it doesn’t change anything about you, it can’t define you, and it can’t be love. Infatuation, maybe. A crush, perhaps. But not love. Love engulfs you like a fire and it doesn’t ask for permission.

It changes everything you once knew about yourself, it rewires you and it’s so scary to go through that kind of change that people run away. They don’t want change, they don’t want to find out how they’ll come out at the other end of the production line. They don’t trust themselves because they fear they’ll lose themselves; and that can only happen when you don’t love yourself first. Love creates a new version of yourself, it induces change. You do things you wouldn’t normally do, but that becomes your new normal. You’re upset when they don’t talk to you for hours, you’re happy when you wake up in the mornings and you don’t know why. You say things you would have once cringed at the thought of. Maybe you start adoring those stupid parrots that are screeching every evening even though they’re so goddamn loud that you can’t hear yourself think. Because now it reminds you of being on the phone and only hearing their voice saying ‘fuck man, those birds are so fucking loud’. Truth is, you didn’t even hear the birds then. But now the reason you listen out for them is because you don’t want to hear yourself think.

You hear pain in their voice and immediately decide right there in that moment that you’ll do anything to take it away. Even though you’re already hurting. Doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll do it,  I’ll do it again, and I’ll do it once more. I’ll redefine myself a million times over as long as the only constant is you. I’ll redefine myself so much that I can’t even recognise the person in the mirror, but as long as I can dive in and pull you out of there somewhere, I’ll know who I am.

It might be the way you no longer see things as black and white, but at the same time you know they are definitely black and white. There’s right and wrong, things are set in stone, like just how much they mean to you; it’s definite, it’s sure, there’s no room for movement. It’s yes or no, it’s all or nothing. But it’s also as if colour never existed before now. It’s like an explosion and it splatters, injecting blue into red and orange into purple. You don’t know where you end and they begin, your past becomes a blur, and ahead is just a blinding mess of light, and you can’t see anything but you’ll take whatever is thrown at you when you walk through it.

It challenges your limits. It defines you by changing the sacrifices you’re willing to make, your tolerance for bullshit. It changes ‘I will never let a man tell me what to do’ to ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy.’ It makes you softer, it redefines your priorities because that love takes  up a fat chunk of your life, and everything else needs to squeeze up and make way. It rearranges what you thought you knew. You knew you would never give anybody a chance, you knew you’d never beg anyone to stay, you knew you ‘would never let that slide’ you knew that you’d never cringe or die. But it changes what you knew. You know different now. You’re a different person altogether. You’ve been redefined.

So I conclude. Love doesn’t define you; it redefines you.

Now Playing: I THINK – Tyler, the Creator